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cylonlover writes "As part of the L, Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award in 1987, a group of science fiction luminaries put together a text 'time capsule' of their predictions about life in the far off year of 2012. Including such names as Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Jack Williamson, Algis Budrys and Frederik Pohl, it gives us an interesting glimpse into how those living in the age before smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi and on-demand streaming episodes of Community thought the future might turn out."

(I just introduced my 9 year old son to Back To The Future. He was bored all through the initial setup and wanted to stop watching. Once Marty went back in time, though, he was hooked. Now he can't wait to see the next 2 movies.)

(I just introduced my 9 year old son to Back To The Future. He was bored all through the initial setup and wanted to stop watching. Once Marty went back in time, though, he was hooked. Now he can't wait to see the next 2 movies.)

Weird. I'd think that for him, it would be someone going from the past to the past. The 80s, the 50s -- it's all long before he was born. I'm not sure I'd be hooked on a movie of someone going from the 50s to the 20s.

Weird. I'd think that for him, it would be someone going from the past to the past. The 80s, the 50s -- it's all long before he was born. I'm not sure I'd be hooked on a movie of someone going from the 50s to the 20s.

Why? The world isn't that different from 1985--not in the ways that matter. Sure, the cars are dated, and Marty uses a Walkman, but he spends so little time in 1985 that it doesn't make much of a difference. (For the record, the movie is 3 years older than me, and it's always been one of my favorites.)

I just introduced my 9 year old son to Back To The Future. He was bored all through the initial setup and wanted to stop watching. Once Marty went back in time, though, he was hooked. Now he can't wait to see the next 2 movies.

Years ago I had the idea to make a site or wiki to gather all the movies from the past once we reach that point. As you pointed out, BttF is just 3 years away. 2001 and 2010 have already passed. Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man* was supposed to take place in 1996 and Judgement Day in T2 was supposed to be in 1997.

Inspiration came from one of my favorite books, Yesterday's Tomorrows [amazon.com] but I wanted to focus specifically on the future as predicted in movies and TV shows that were set in the "future".

They all missed that scientists would build a worldwide, high speed network for the reliable transmission of pornography to all corners of the planet, from Communist China, to the Soviet Union to the Arab world.

They also missed out on predicting that a dangerous, violent cult would attack that network and its users in court when people dared to tell the truth about that cult. Then again, the contest is sponsored by a subsidiary of that same cult, so I guess we should not be surprised...

They all missed that scientists would build a worldwide, high speed network for the reliable transmission of pornography to all corners of the planet, from Communist China, to the Soviet Union to the Arab world.

It's been said that porn has been responsible for ALL technological advancements. VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, all for porn. The internet, graphical displays, web browser, usenet, ftp, etc. I'm drawing a blank at the moment for other examples, I'm sure/. can fill in the blanks for more.

They all missed that scientists would build a worldwide, high speed network for the reliable transmission of pony video mashups to all corners of the planet, from Communist China, to the Soviet Union to the Arab world.

This is vaguely interesting, but imo, near-term predictions of technological development aren't really what you go to sci-fi for. If you really want an accurate prediction 15 years out, there are more qualified but generally less exciting people to get it from than sci-fi authors: that's near enough that you really just need people with a good amount of historical knowledge, extensive information about current developments, and perhaps especially, accurate knowledge of current research progress, prospects, and bottlenecks. And a decent ability to synthesize and evaluate all those variables.

Sci-fi's strengths are, instead, more about what-if than what-is-likely. One kind is technological what-ifs, imagining (at least in hard sci-fi) conceptually plausible but not anywhere near buildable technologies and their results and implications; and ethical/political/etc. what-ifs, analyzing how future societies might operate (often in either dystopian or utopian visions).

What are you talking about? Two of those are correct, they just got the scale wrong. Energy has gotten much more expensive than in 1997, but not enough that it's causing massive problems in developed countries, yet. Why do you think energy-efficient appliances and vehicles are so popular now?

No serious science fiction writer in their right mind seriously thinks they can accurately predict the future. The good science fiction writers merely use the future to explore the issues of the present and their implications (and perhaps offer admonishment, with a glimpse of what could go wrong if a particular path is followed).

No serious science fiction writer in their right mind seriously thinks they can accurately predict the future. The good science fiction writers merely use the future to explore the issues of the present and their implications (and perhaps offer admonishment, with a glimpse of what could go wrong if a particular path is followed).

I didn't get the impression that any of them seriously thought their predictions might be correct, but it's still an interesting read.

Curiously, in an article containing L. Ron Hubbard, your sig was the first mention of scientology!

The good science fiction writers merely use the future to explore the issues of the present and their implications as a background to a story he hopes to sell so he can pay the rent and buy food.

There, fixed that for you.Science fiction keeps getting put up on some kind of pedestal, and people keep forgetting that it's primary goal is to be entertaining enough to induce people to part with their hard earned cash. Science fiction authors are neither mystics nor prophets, they're entertainers.

I've only read Ender's Game, so I'm not working from a big sample size, but as far as that one goes I thought it was superb, intelligent, insightful and subtle. He compares favourably with Asimov and Baxter as far as I'm concerned (although a bit soft to draw comparisons with Clarke).

Unfortunately, the series goes off a cliff not too long after that. Speaker for the Dead is also good, as is most of Xenocide. He completely failed at coming up with a solution to the story in Xenocide, though, and the ending made me refuse to read any more of his books. It ranks only slightly above the last episode of Voyager.

All of Card's books, from what I understand, have no real solution. Ender's Game was terrible: there was no sane way to approach the problem at hand, and the books further down the line play on the whole mess. For example, Ender is immortalized as a horrible genocidal maniac who exterminates an entire alien culture... after being tricked into thinking he's playing a computer game, by a race of people who believe the aliens are coming to destroy them, and of course immediately take over all the planets th

Ender's Game is like a third grade reading level, and Orson Scott Card went on a tirade against all his critics claiming that writing prose isn't really important. In his book about Characters and Viewpoint, he even makes a different argument: if you don't write well, nobody is going to figure out what the hell story you're trying to tell.

Ender's Game had a well-developed story, but it was poorly executed. It was like reading a kid's story.

Counting through the predictions I'd say 10-20% of those accurate with maybe 50% pointing to trends that may happen (and probably where started before 1987 anyway like credit cards leading the way for cashless society).

Pretty crappy performance really - and generally over-estimating the rate of progress. But I think that is well known phenomenon where people over-estimate progress over 10-30 years but substantially fall short on predictions for 50-100 years. Interesting paradox !!!

Even when they're get something right, they usually miss the real use or significance of it, or they characterize it in some bizarre way. A lot of people predicted, for example, that people would one day all have computers in their homes, but they almost all botched how they would actually be USED.

Funny, when I read the parent post, "Idiocracy" the first thing that came to my mind too. A society of dumbasses seems a far more likely future scenario than some Star Trek socialist/intellectual utopia.

Our future predictions are largely based on extrapolated endpoints which are at least somewhat reliably based on understanding the potentials of known science and technology. However, we are much worse at predicting RATES of progress, i.e. how long it might take to get to these endpoints, because the rates are not based on known fact, but on things like politics, social trends, economics, etc, that in the best of cases are themselves rates, and therefore you are trying to guess about rates based on rates --

Please, please, please tell me you are joking... I am an avid reader of science fiction from William Gibson/Neal Stephenson to Robert Heinlein/Isaac Asimov and around to John Varley and Spider Robinson. In my much younger years (call it late teens), I tried to read Battlefield Earth and then the Mission Earth series (I had the first 5 volumes in hard cover for some reason). I quit reading Battlefield after 60 or so pages. I quit reading the first book in the Mission Earth after 20 pages or so. I do not mind

I think I got maybe a quarter through the first Mission Earth book before dropping it. All I can remember was a desperate and dishonest main character doing increasingly desperate and dishonest things and digging himself deeper into a hole while trying and failing to get the better of the "good guy". The only thing I found vaguely interesting was wondering whether the good guy was completely dumb and oblivious as he foiled the MC's plots, or just played dumb and oblivious while being superior to the plots.

Arthur C. Clark's 2001 A Space Odyssey predicted the iPad in 1968. He called it a "Newspad" and it connected to all major newspapers over the "ether". In the book, Heywood Floyd reads it on his way to the space station. In the movie, you can see Bowman and Poole watching the news on them during the first scenes on Discovery.

Space Cadet, written in 1948, had a throw-away line about cell phones as well. The protagonist is standing in a line and gets a call from his father. Someone else in the same line notices and asks if it was family calling. When confirmed, the second person claims that he stowed his phone in his luggage to prevent such calls.

When I first read this story as a child, I wondered about how long the phone cord would have to be. It wasn't until several years later, when cell phones did arrive, that I realized how

The difference between Sci Fi and Wi Fi is that they're both poor designations for differing reasons. Oft, the former contains more events based on actual facts and mathematics than your average (Auto)Biography... If you're talking the station itself, it comes in over wireless signal (WiFi? no Microwave -- Like the oven? No. The radar? Yeah, something like that) and has been dumbed down and renamed to Sy Fy (with plans to complete the naming conversion to Syphie -- slang for one having syphilis). The la

I suspect the article is wrong about hunger. Compared to the 80's, the world has fewer famines. The absolute number of hungry people may be up, but as a percentage of the global population, it's probably lower than in the 80's.

In Heinlein's Future History series from the 1950s, there is a time line chart. This chart shows a "false dawn" in space travel - initial success around 1970, then a long hiatus.

In Heinlein's "The Man who Sold The Moon", the problem is made clear - fuel. A chemically powered rocket can just barely make it to the moon, with severe weight restrictions. Nuclear rockets are too dangerous. And so, the first lunar landing is a publicity stunt.

Heinlein could do the math. Space travel with chemical rockets is just barely feasible and hugely expensive. Nuclear rocket engines were built and successfully tested in the 1950s, but are too dangerous to use. Fusion isn't even close to working. So we're stuck.

David Brin is not included in these predictions, but he started writing a book called "Earth" in 1987 that had some interesting predictions of its own for the near future (2038, in his case).

-Networked computing connects all the people on the globe, and becomes the dominant way people access news and information.-Computers shrink to the point where they become wearable, and people carry them around with them at all time.-It becomes common for people to carry around small personal video cameras so they can

However, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which even the CIA missed predicting, made the whole U.N. running the world to avoid nuclear war thing moot. Meanwhile, the current situation in Syria and the ineffectiveness of the U.N. in dealing with it only illustrates how far off the mark he was in predicting a world at peace.

Au contraire, with India and Pakistan in possession of nukes, and the technology in increasing danger of falling into the wrong hands, I would say that international bodies like the UN are needed more than ever. The UN was never intended to "run the world" anyway, that's just redneck paranoia. The UN is about providing a forum and framework in which nations can discuss their concerns and make them known without resorting to conflict as the first option. There's nothing "moot" about the threat of nuclear an

Whatever happens, I can predict one thing: the world tomorrow will be uglier, more crowded and less educated that the world today.

That's true, and one doesn't even have to touch upon the more controversial (not for me) things such as AGW.

For intance, there was a time when eating salmon and other large fish was unambiguously healthy. Not anymore: the concentration of mercury in the oceans (because of coal-fired plants) has been steadily increasing, and with it, mercury in the fish. Now you have to weight the pros and the cons of eating it.

Heck I don't even know we are in the end of cheap energy. Fracking seems to be giving us a real surge of cheap energy. At the same time solar efficiency as gone from 10 years output to 3.5 years output to build a panel. Which means its viable. Wind turbines now work really well so that technology can spread. Be careful with predictions we may very well have been through a trough of expensive energy.

As far as education.... the last decade has been bad. The last century has been amazing.

Wind Turbines are being fought by hippies because they kill eagles. Within 5 years, I expect the ELA (Eagle Liberation Army) to be formed, and in 25 they are a well known terror group that destroys wind turbines in such numbers that military protection is necessary, making them largely uneconomical. Solar efficiency becomes much better, but only in China because the US government collapses under its "far worse than Greece" debt after the Renminbi becomes the world bank currency and they are no longer able t

I think this prediction is total bullshit. Go to China and ask young people there whether they look forward to a brighter future or not. Over there, things are constantly getting better.

Sure, the sun has set on the American empire, and everything is indeed getting worse here in the so-called "land of the free" where the police have turned into para-military squads, but America is not representative of the whole world.

Where there is disagreement is what to do about the tradeoffs between those 4 objectives. Not addressing legitimate concerns about safe / clean has created mistrust. The way to handle that is an effective outside audit i.e. regulation.

Fracking for natural gas -- one of the cheapest, cleanest, safest, and most reliable domestic energy sources -- has been made illegal in some states. Environmentalists oppose fracking for natural gas because they don't want us to have cheap energy.

The only state in which fracking is illegal to the best of my knowledge is Vermont and they don't have any natural gas, so it is symbolic. If someone discovered natural gas reserves in Vermont symbolism be damned they'd be fracking. Now the real issue with fra

"No one has any idea", so let's obstruct."No one has been able to answer",so shut it down forever."That's a problem", so don't produce any energy."No one knows", so stop doing anything until everyone knows all possible outcomes."There is a lot of risk there potentially" and no risk can ever be tolerated."There have been some problems" and no one in the world has ever had problems before, so let's not start doing this problematic energy production.There's "not enough oil" and therefore it's impossible to dis

Where is that coming from? I would suggest you start reading actual environmentalists and not FOXNews' version of environmental debates. Sheila Jackson gives speeches on these topics all the time. Pull some of the transcripts.

I didn't say anything about shutting down fracking forever. The only person whose been talking about shutting down fracking is you. If you want my actual proposals:

1) That fracking chemicals no longer be consider trade secrets and instead are matters of public record, subject to regulation2) That a permanent geological group be established in the EPA to evaluate effects of fracking with budget to conduct and fund research3) Other than that I'd like to encourage the US to move as quickly to as much frac

Which basically summarized is, fracking is a huge economic benefit and the we need to evaluate safety procedures in terms of their costs to keep them down for the oil and gas industry while protecting the long term viability of fracking as an energy source. Both parties are pro-fracking. The debate is over the amount of regulation ranging fr

L Ron Hubbard was a popular SF writer before he went nuts. (Or more (or less?) charitably speaking, before he figured he could accumulate wealth and power by inventing a religion.) A lot of writers go a bit weird in their old age (more specifically a lot of people go weird in their old age, but authors are in a pretty good position to publicize their own weirdness) but very few manage to go so far as to taint everything they've done before. Heinlein, James P Hogan, Terry Goodkind, Orson Scott Card, they all went a bit off the deep end later, but you can still admit to liking their earlier stuff and recommend that other people check it out without shame. (Well, except maybe for Orson Scott Card. I'll admit to liking his old stuff, but i'd be hesitant to suggest anyone actually support him by paying money for any of his books, even the older ones.)

OSC was pretty crazy even in his youth, though I will admit it's gotten worse. Still, if you buy books used, the money doesn't actually end up with the author, which is usually a bad thing, but in this case...